Founding convention · Houston · March 19–20, 2027
Progressive Émigrés, USA
Justice. Equity. Freedom of thought.
An organization being founded by former and present members of the National Students Federation, Pakistan — and by Pakistani progressives who have made their lives in America.
We are not yet an organization. We are a founding membership that intends to become one — by adopting a name, a Vision and a Mission in Houston on March 20, 2027.
Why now
Forty years is a long time to be quiet.
Most of us met for the first time in the student movement in Pakistan. Then we scattered — to America, to careers, to families — and the politics that formed us did not so much disappear as go unspoken.
This is an attempt to bring it back into the open, as an organization rather than a memory. Not a reunion, though there will be a reunion. Something that is still here in thirty years, when we are not.
The founding membership is being assembled now. A survey of founding members has shaped the agenda, and the convention in March will put a Vision and a Mission to a vote.
What we stand for
Three commitments, and one method.
These are the terms on which this organization is being founded. The Vision and Mission that follow from them are the business of the convention, not of this page.
Justice
For working people, here and in the countries we came from. Not as sentiment, but as policy positions a reasonable person could disagree with.
Equity
Including inside our own communities. An organization that will not examine the hierarchies it carries with it has no standing to challenge anyone else's.
Freedom of thought
The right to argue, to dissent, to be wrong in public and corrected in public — in the academy, in the press, and in our own meetings.
And the method: peaceful discourse.
We intend to work openly and lawfully in the United States, in partnership with organizations of similar thought here and around the world. We argue, we organize, we persuade. That is the whole of it.
The question we begin with
Who does the left speak for now?
Socialism inherited two things from the nineteenth century. A subject — a working class you could locate, count and organize, because it stood in one building. And an instrument — the union, the party, the national state, levers that reached what needed reaching because capital and labor sat in one jurisdiction.
Both are now in question, and for opposite reasons. The subject is dissolving from below: work unbundled, wages set by systems no worker can see, people counted in no statistic a policy can attach to. The instrument is outflanked from above: capital, supply chains, data and migration cross borders that unions and states do not.
It is also a fair description of this membership — formed in one country's politics, organizing in another, forty years later. Our founding convention begins there.
Houston, Texas · March 19–20, 2027
The founding convention.
Two days. The first is for finding each other again. The second is for deciding what we are.
Friday, March 19
Meet, greet, remember
Afternoon into the evening
- Arrivals, chai, and a memory wall of photographs, pamphlets and campus papers brought by members
- A meet-and-greet reception, and dinner
- A cultural evening — a mushaira, and Faiz, Jalib and Sahir set to music
No speeches and no business. Deliberately.
Saturday, March 20
Organization
9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
- Three addresses, in person and by video link
- Greetings from allied organizations
- Two working plenaries — Vision before lunch, Mission after
- Debate, amendment, and the votes
- The signing of the founding roll
Livestreamed for members abroad. Only the room votes.
What Saturday must produce
Five things, or the weekend was a reunion.
- An adopted name. Carried by vote and minuted, so the question is not reopened at every future meeting.
- An adopted Vision. One paragraph. What the world looks like if we succeed — short enough to say from memory.
- An adopted Mission. What we will do, for whom, by what means — and what we will not do.
- An interim steering committee. Named people with named responsibilities, explicitly interim.
- A date and a deadline. A constitutional convention within twelve months, with bylaws to members sixty days ahead.
Partnership
We would rather join something than start something alone.
There are organizations in the United States and abroad already doing work we believe in — in labor, in immigrant rights, in civil liberties, and across the South Asian diaspora.
We are approaching them, and we would rather be useful to them than duplicate them. If you organize somewhere we should know about, or if your organization would send someone to Houston in March, we would be thankful to hear from you.
Register your interest
Put your name down.
The founding roll is being assembled now. Whether you want to be a founding member, attend in March, help with the work, or simply be kept informed — this is the place to say so.